Way back when, say 2004ish, I wrote a diary about the concept of Republican scandal fatigue; the idea being that if the news is so inundated with various degrees of Repug lawbreaking that the general public would stop caring. Maybe stop caring would be the wrong term, how about lose the will to keep trying to process the information. I mean, when there's vengeful astronauts and dying blonde bimbos, who cares whether all the US Attorneys are being wingnuttified or our civil rights are slowly being chipped away at....
I mean, this is the definition of "death of thousand cuts" with the dying body being the prominence of the US in the global scene, as well as the functionality and capability of the goverment, and the thousand cuts being all the scandals and various wrong-doings (legal or not), but the Repugs. Follow below the fold for a take on my personal choices for scandals as well as an opportunity to post your choices.....
The most damaging scandals in my personal view:
- Botched Hurricane Katrina Response: I remember when it all was going down, a visiting Australian researcher I was hanging out with wondered why I was so agitated. Having been through Hurricane Andrew in South Florida, I ws horrified at how slow the response was by comparison and double horrified by Bush's Nero-esque strumming while New Orleans drowned. That evidence of failed leadership alone should have been enough to have Bush booted. This one stung me the most as it was the greatest failing of the American goverment for its own people...
- The Extraordinary Rendition, Pro-torture, Secret Prison Manifesto: While this is a vertiable shitload of smaller, yet all more or less equally horrific, travesties rolled up into one uber-outrage upon our country, it none the less destroyed our standing in the world. Yeah, bin Laden and the al-Queda set deserved to have some misery reigned down on them, when we started snatching innocent people off the street (or off the jetway) and shipped them around the world to have their bodies tortured and their minds destroyed, we became downright fucking evil.
- The Iraq War (hopefully limited to only Iraq): I still can't get my head around the ability of BushCo to sell the war based on lies, in plain daylight have all the Repug corporate cronies profit massively at the cost of our soldiers, and now admit their has been massive theft and graft involved, and oh yeah, they admit they lied about the rationales they used. Any one of those elements should have had us marching in the streets to demand and end, but here we are in year four of our attempt to destabilize the middle East and we can't even get our own liberal representative goverment to agree on a way to end it...all while the shitstorm gets shittier and stormier.
Yet the three aforementioned atrocities are but the tip of the iceberg, the fish rots from the head down and some of the stuff coming to light: the US Attorney purge, the the unresolved elements of PlameGate (hey Darth Cheney...), remember Jack Abramhoff, , the billion in cash that disappeared in Iraq...the list goes on and on....
So for purposes of morbid curiosity, I'm interested in which of the crimes (persecuted or hopefully, soon to be) of BushCo personally pissed you off the most....I also wouldn't mind seeing this diary evolve into a laundry list of BushCo's blights on the US and the world.